A Zombie Eye On The Future

Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog

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I realize that the really big news today is that master strategist John Boehner allegedly told Harry Reid to go fk himself. As is well-known, the blog is all in favor of this kind of thing, if only because it keeps things clear and honest, and is completely hilarious, and we need some of that, too. However, when I went to bed last night, the really big news was that Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin and first runner-up for the second-highest office in the land, voted in favor of the deal that kept us from sliding down the Gentle Fiscal Incline. There are a number of reasons not to be surprised by this.

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1) The deal was just conservative enough. Ryan believes he can sell the notion that permanently freezing the Bush tax cuts for people making up to $400,000 a year — and, again, welcome all of you to what the political elite now refers to as The Middle Class — can be sold as a tax cut for them, rather than a tax hike on the people making that much or more. (This seems to be congealing into conventional conservative wisdom, at least inside the Beltway. Even Grover Norquist is pushing that line.) As he said in his statement:

"Today, I joined my colleagues in the House to protect as many Americans as possible from a tax increase. We also provided certainty by making the lower tax rates permanent. The House has already passed legislation to prevent tax increases for every American family, and it is unfortunate that President Obama insisted on taking more from hardworking taxpayers. Despite my concerns with other provisions in the bill, I commend my colleagues for limiting the damage as much as possible."

The wilder precincts of the Right may howl, but I suspect that Ryan may be more right than he is wrong here, largely because of the fact that...

2) Paul Ryan Flies Business Class. For all his Randian rhetoric, and the endless head-fakes he makes in the general direction of Opportunity For All — Pro Tip, Paul. For a head fake to work, sooner or later, you have to take a shot. — Ryan is fundamentally a creature of the high-end businessmen who finance his party. This is occasionally obscured by that rhetoric, and those head fakes, but his primary constituencies always have been the guys in nice suits sitting in a boardroom, and not the people in tricorns waving muskets outside the strip malls in Florida. He sold the latter out on TARP. He drove Rand Paul around the bend — admittedly, a soft 9-iron rather than an actual drive — by backing Boehner's purge of Tea Party congresscritters from their committee positions. And he got heckled from his right throughout the campaign because he signed on to the sequestration deal. The one thing consistent in all these positions is that none of them would cost him very much of the support he gained from the people who have been paying for his $700 bottles of wine.

Ryan's true loyalties are also obscured by the fact that the corporate class has become just as radicalized as the people at the strip mall. It just isn't as nihilistic. It wants radical conservative policies, but it also has more than vested interest in not seeing the entire system, which they spent so much time and effort and money in purchasing, crash and burn. The one thing I underestimated in watching the recent fandango play out in Congress was the possibility that the Republican corporate elite would bring down the hammer. For all his renegade up-from-Janesville mummery, Paul Ryan always has known where the real power is, and he has resolutely kept faith with that power. Which is why, if he's serious about making a run in 2016, he had a better week than did any of the other possible contenders.